This is the story of my life. A life lived in books and desperately dull for the most part. I've hardly ever had any real adventures or traveled much (by modern standards), barely known anyone famous or slept with many women. Other than my marriage to a truly remarkable one, there's been nothing out of the ordinary about my life in any way.
Except, possibly, for the fact that I'm a vampire.
In addition to being supernaturally dull and uninteresting (and, these days, old), I also have a very short attention span. I know, I know, I should simply start, like Alice, at the beginning of this story, my birth, and then go on until I reach the end. That end being, presumably, my death. But the problem with this schema is twofold. One the one hand, I can never stick to any subject for more than five minutes. I've had to face the fact long ago: I am very, very shallow (but only superficially so). On the other hand, I'm still a bit unclear as to whether vampires do die naturally or not--aside from being impaled, incinerated or contracting blood diseases, I mean. Myth and tradition seem to suggest we don't. However, most of the other practicing vampires I've met socially seem to suggest otherwise; several have died of AIDS, and one or two others have actively tried to kill me.
OK, I'll be honest (though that's an extremely foolish precedent to set in any autobiography). I'm not just shallow, I'm flighty. Flighty and foolish and completely scatterbrained. My thoughts go everywhere, like a yapping dog let out of a small yard, dashing off in all directions at once. It's a wonder I've ever finished anything--comic strips, novels, my breakfast this morning. Though all of them undeniably show the symptoms of my lack of serious-mindedness, this inability to concentrate. Particularly my breakfast, half of which still luridly stains my pyjama top. I look at these words I've just typed on the computer screen and then add: "Dude, you're a half-wit". And sadly, I'm right, for once.
And also for once, possibly even for the first time, I'm sure my wife will concur.
Actually, this is not a true autobiography at all, merely a series of biographical sketches to accompany a portfolio of reprinted black and white cartoons and comic strips from early on in my career as a writer and illustrator. Though, happily for the world, most from that period in the 1970s are lost forever. You notice I say "writer" and "illustrator"; I only turned to illustration to try to sell my otherwise unsaleable stories--then, when that ambition abjectly failed, I turned to outright cartooning. Or as it is now termed, "graphic novels". Whatever you care to call the genre, it has been a gross prostitution of my talents, a cheap and easy trick to beguile simple illiterate savages, like dangling bright beads in front of their eyes. Hell will literally have to freeze over before I resort to such pitiful tricks again to gain attention.
[Insert graphics scans here:]
As you can see, I was (and am) no artist, either. The primary characteristic I notice about these early efforts, circa the early 1970s or so, is their softness. From somewhere, I have acquired a terribly soft, sincere, gooey drawing style that reminds me, at its best, of the cartoons of the PreRaphaelites. At its worst, of Peter Max or somebody. My work now seems hopelessly naive and graceless. I will not say completely devoid of talent. No, I will not say that, however much I may think it--though others may be less charitable. However, after I met Lilli, my wife, my style dramatically changed. Why? Because I was undergoing a crisis, many crises at once, in fact: artistic, spiritual, health, financial...you name it. I'd spent my last high school years with the certain weight of the military draft and the Vietnam War hanging over my head. The college deferment had been ended, and in its place the "Lottery" had been instituted, a pool of all draft-age young men with a number assigned to their birthdate in each year. The lower your number, the higher the likelihood of your being drafted. The first 40 or 50 numbers were a certainty to end up in Vietnam; my number was 12. By contrast, the numbers of George and PHarris, my two closest friends, were 345 and 362 respectively. I'd never won anything in my life up to then--a bet, a dare, a lottery ticket, a game of cards. Nothing. So there was no reasonable expectation that I ever would win anything.
Like Lilli Loewen.
I found myself thinking about her a lot after we first met (and I will describe our first meeting to you in a moment, never fear. Ad nauseam). A whole lot. Like, all the time. My problem was, I couldn't draw her from memory. I used to sit alone for hours in my dank little room in the church basement trying, but my efforts were pitiful and looked clownish. Suddenly all my artwork looked that way to me. I gave it up with an overwhelming sense of existential nausea, the sort of crippling emotional revulsion elaborately detailed in Colin Wilson's "The Outsider". I was an outsider. In fact, I've always been an outsider--but more about this later. I was talking about something else. Lilli. Oh yes, and my art. Do you think an all-blood diet could cause a form of dementia or mental derangement? Didn't King George III supposedly have porphyria, too? He was mad, according to that movie, at least. However, I'm not that far gone; perhaps I'm merely absent-minded.
